A Coriolis flowmeter is a type of flowmeter, where flowmeters, generally speaking, provide information about materials being transferred through a conduit or flowtube. For example, density meters, or densitometers, provide a measurement of the density of material flowing through a conduit. Additionally, mass flowmeters provide a measurement of the mass of material being transferred through a conduit by, for example, deriving the mass flow measurement from an earlier density measurement and a volumetric flow measurement. Other mass flowmeters may calculate mass flow directly.
Coriolis-type flowmeter systems calculate density and mass flow using the Coriolis effect, in which material flowing through a rotating conduit is affected by a Coriolis force and therefore experiences an acceleration. Many Coriolis mass flowmeter systems induce a Coriolis force by sinusoidally oscillating a conduit about a pivot axis orthogonal to the length of the conduit. In such mass flowmeters, the Coriolis reaction force experienced by the traveling fluid mass is transferred to the conduit itself and is manifested as a deflection or offset of the conduit in the direction of the Coriolis force vector in the plane of rotation.